Vincenzo Ferrari, the Seventies: The Enigma of Writing

Abstract

“I don’t care about the solution; I am interested about the enigma. The scripts unveil the complexity of the artwork: (…) if you look for a permanent solution, you will never find it in art”: according to Vincenzo Ferrari (1941-2012) the unambiguity of signifier and meaning can be exceeded through the union of verbal and pictorial signs, a resolute certainty that leads the artist to focus his entire production during the 1970s on verbal and visual experimentation. After a first merely pictorial experience in the late 1960s, his artworks show a consolidation of the use of language through apparently meaningless self-created alphabets drawn freehand or printed through a printing press. The idea is conveyed by a “pictorial interpretation of writing” (Elena Pontiggia) that is examined within his Scale cromatiche, thus also by means of the continuous repetition of a single concept, like in the series of Banalità, at this point places composed by only words. In 1972, Ferrari joins the Venice Biennale showing his artist’s books, while in 1975 he signs the collective Manifesto della Nuova Scrittura where he explains that “The new writing is a ‘creative process’ through which finite opportunities reach their infinite ways of realization”. The real is thus transformed in a kaleidoscopic entity, thus enabling new unprecedented possibilities: the result is an extention of the imaginary that reveals, above all, an unconditional freedom of thought.